Why the Geek Community Hates ‘The Big Bang Theory’

The Big Bang Theory will hit 200 episodes on Thursday night. For those doing the calculations, that’s a whole lotta Thai takeout boxes, comic book references, white board equations, rounds of “Soft Kitty” and bazingas. The CBS sitcom about a ragtag gang of scientists (and those who love, or at least tolerate, them) remains a monster ratings hit, and has already been renewed for a 10th season with cast members earning $1 million per episode.

But as its popularity seems to defy gravity, the show’s critics—and across the Internet, there are hordes of them—are getting louder, and more annoyed. Viewers have called out BBT for various reasons—the exaggerated audience laughter (though the show is way creepy without it), its lighthearted propagation of rape culture, and an observation that the characters are psychologically broken but simply laugh it off. Though one overarching belief shared by haters is that the show does not accurately represent nerd culture.

Reddit user informat3 lays out the issue like this: “BBT catches shit because it treats nerds, and nerd culture as being a laughable set of stereotypes, when many people feel that its an important cultural part of their life. It reads like blackface for nerds.” In Reddit’s Funny community, the redditor successfully unravels the mystery of why the show is so loathed by those it’s trying to depict.

South Park’s “Make Love not Warcraft” episode managed to make WoW the subject of their jokes. Community’s “D&D” episode managed to make D&D the subject of their jokes. Are they both poking fun at a lot of the elements in these things? Absolutely, but that’s just it. They’re making fun of parts of it, like the guy who gets way too into roleplay, getting killed by a bad dice roll, the neckbeard that plays WoW 20 hours a day. In BBT, nerd culture itself is the joke. I remember one episode where Sheldon said he was playing N64 on an emulator, and the laugh track played. I was expecting that to be the setup to the joke, but it wasn’t. That was the joke, the idea that someone would want to play an N64 game on a computer was the punchline.

Animator and voice actor KawaiiPiranha created the BBT parody “Barzoople,” which gets to a similar point.

The bottom line: If you’re going to make a show about nerds, at least make it clever.

From Reddit’s Funny community:

Reddit user j0be

2) “Exploitative humor.”

For some frustrated by the show, it’s personal.

Alright, let’s not beat around the bush here. Butthurt is an inherent, and important part of nerd culture. Some off us got off easy just being “weird kids,” and some of us got beaten up daily, but very few people who were deeply entrenched in typically “nerdy” things had smooth sailing in our younger years, and that, unfortunately, breeds a lot of bitterness. I think a lot of people having grown up under that kind of a weight resent seeing the culture they were mocked for adopting being played for a joke. It wasn’t funny when they got their nose bloodied because they read books during lunch. No one played it as an affable, comedic, good-hearted moment when someone slung their Magic cards off the table and laughed while they picked them up. So, I think a lot of people see this being played out as a comedy being marketed to the demographics that once mocked nerds as being somewhat of an affront, an opening of old wounds.

3) “The Uncanny Valley”

Real nerd hobbies are depicted on the show, and so is real science (BBT producers employ physicist David Saltzberg to check all the scientific facts, down to the equations on the whiteboards). And yet there’s a great disconnect with real nerd culture. Here, informat3 explains:

Maybe using the term uncanny valley is a bit of a stretch. Perhaps “close, but no cigar” would fit better. In any case, this is another reason why I think “nerds” largely reject BBT; it is a close approximation of nerd culture, but its not quite an accurate representation. When people see the GUI interface in Visual Basic, or the Hacker Typer representation of security in other shows, they’re willing to laugh it off. Its bad, but its so bad that people laugh rather than rage. The problem with BBT is that we really DO play N64 games on an emulator, but we would be using a USB controller to play, not the keyboard. We really DO have gaming machines that we built, but they wouldn’t be an Alienware. We DO keep a whiteboard in our apartment for ideas, but its not a competition between us. BBT catches flack because its not far enough off the mark to write off, but its not close enough to identify with.

For geeks, it’s obvious the show is about them, but not made for them. This tweet from Lyle McDouchebag sums it up in 20 seconds.